Wojciech, the beer drinking, cigarette smoking, artillery toting bear
Things That Explode I »
I was watching a show with my mom called Inside the Body of Henry VIII and at the very end of the show, after having detailed the king’s ailments and maladies and described him as a “28 stone man-mountain,” the narrator says, “There was yet one final indignity for Henry VIII. There are contemporary accounts which say that his bloated 28 stone corpse exploded inside his coffin” (or something to that effect).
Of course, I had to internet search this idea of exploding kings, which eventually lead me to some very interesting wikipedia articles, which I will list in this tumblr in a series I am calling Things That Explode.
The first one that I came across was the humble carpenter ant. I always thought of them as do nothing, chewers of wood pulp, but they’re in fact much more exciting! When they find themselves embroiled in an ant battle, and the tide seems to be turning against them, they can initiate an ant self-destruct sequence:
Its defensive behaviors include self-destruction by autothysis. Two oversized, poison-filled mandibular glands run the entire length of the ant’s body. When combat takes a turn for the worse, the ant violently contracts its abdominal muscles to rupture its body and spray poison or glue in all directions.[4][5] The ant has an enormously enlarged mandibular (abdomen) gland, many times the size of a normal ant, which produces the glue. The glue bursts out and entangles and immobilizes all nearby victims.
They’re like little miniature predators
“They got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said, ‘we will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story.”
Tim Burton - Vincent
charlene and I both have one of these (bracelets, not wrists, but she has at least one of those as well) because curing AIDS is a cause near and dear to our hearts.
We’re kind of like two planeteers except when we let our powers combine, fire and heart waves don’t come out from our bracelets, money just comes out from our pockets and instead of having a worthy adversary like Looten Plunder, we just have the condescending sales lady who likes to show off her knowledge of and commitment to every cause in the world - I think in addition to her AIDS cure bracelet she had an AIDS preservation anklet, but that may have been a court ordered tracking device.
Maudie Hopkins
“It was not especially uncommon for young women in Arkansas to marry Confederate pensioners…”this is also very interesting
The fruit itself may have originated in India. The ‘gregor banks’ was known to the ancient Mesopotamians no later than the 3rd century BC and eaten in ancient Egypt, Greece, andRome. The gherkin is mentioned in English in the seventeenth century, although the English diarist Samuel Pepys describes the ‘girkin’ in his entry for 1661-12-01 as ‘a rare thing’. Knowledge of the condiment may have been disseminated throughout Europe from the Middle East in the course of the Jewish Diaspora.
just once in my life I’d like somebody to see if I fancy a gherkin while I’m wearing a reindeer jumper
A range of colourful stories have been handed down about Charles Waterton, not all of which are verifiable, but which add up to a popular portrait of an archetypal aristocratic eccentric:
- Waterton had his hair cut in a crew cut at a time when a full head of hair piled up or brushed forward was in style.
- In 1817, he climbed St. Peter’s in Rome and left his gloves on top of the lightning conductor. Pope Pius VII asked him to remove the gloves, which he did.
- Waterton sometimes enjoyed biting the legs of his guests from under the dinner table, imitating a dog.
- He tried to fly by jumping from the top of an outhouse on his estate, calling the exercise “Navigating the atmosphere”.
- He devised his own methods for preserving animal skins and used them to create unusual caricatures of his enemies. He also utilised his taxidermy skills to create models critiquing political events of the day.
- He believed in the medical remedy of blood-letting, which was largely an abandoned practice at that point in time. When ill he bled himself heavily.
